This article is about natural Quartz, which may contain various impurities that yield different colours when irradiated and baked. Manufactured Quartz will -depending on the source of the quartz sand normally used - also contain impurities which will yield certain colours. This is not surprising at all, and in many ways not particularly useful. We have controls for this phenomenon already. Unused tubes.

There's no water- even the tube cement plug was dry. The quartz tube is a previously used one and merely a little milky. It's direct from the same manufacturer as the others though. There's no heavy water anywhere, and the exposed end is plugged with alumina wool - which has collected some carbon-smoke from the ingredients and discoloured a little.

You reactor is packed an waiting for collection btw - spare thermocouples, fuel tubes and also a spare quartz liner and heating coil are in the box. Its calibrated pretty closely - just a few degrees difference between ports at 800C. However, I calibrated it with thermocouple inserted in the front, you will need to re-check using the 2 internal tc's. If there is significant variation shorten the coil in the coolest tube- but not by more than 1cm at a time. Allow at least 2 hours for warm-up before calibration and avoid drafts. I'll send tracking details when the system goes live.

There's no water- even the tube cement plug was dry. The quartz tube is a previously used one and merely a little milky. It's direct from the same manufacturer as the others though. There's no heavy water anywhere, and the exposed end is plugged with alumina wool - which has collected some carbon-smoke from the ingredients and discoloured a little.

Thanks for the shipping schedule, much appreciated.

This is the apparent water I was asking about. I suppose it could be chips in the quartz tube itself.

Can someone provide a link to a description of this "LION" experiment? What did they do?

The MFMP group on their twitter page promotes the bogus and ridiculous "Hutchison Effect" by the ignorant crank John Hutchison. That MFMP believes Hutchison's nonsense indicates scientific illiteracy and incompetence. Anyone that believes the Hutchison garbage sucks at science.

OK so it looks like in this experiment a bunch of (seemingly random) chemicals and metals were packed in a tube and heated to 800C. There was no calorimetry. What is the point of this experiment? Looks worthless to me.

So the metals oxidized and there were some chemical reactions. Thats predictable and expected.

I'm still waiting for that materials expert to come over so we can salami-slice it open with a diamond saw rather than butcher it with a hammer. Sadly he is (unexpectedly) on the sick-list, but tells me he will be able to do it soon.

Thank you. Later I will hopefully post some interesting data (moderately interesting at least) from a 'dummy run' using the LION protocols but with under-prepared diamonds. I will do another this week.

Thank you. Later I will hopefully post some interesting data (moderately interesting at least) from a 'dummy run' using the LION protocols but with under-prepared diamonds. I will do another this week.

Sounds interesting. Without knowing what you have seen in the runs you are currently analyzing, I suggest that at some point it may also be of interest to try and replicate the results (rather than the procedures) of the LION 1 and 2 runs. By this I mean to try and do whatever it takes to melt the copper off of the core and see what then happens to the quartz liner and the alumina foam block underneath it. I suppose that would mean taking an unfueled core and turning the heat up as high as you can get it.

.....and do whatever it takes to melt the copper off of the core and see what then happens to the quartz liner and the alumina foam block underneath it.

Hi Bruce. A worthy suggestion but I'm not sure that a Model T could get the copper hot fast enough to melt it before it oxidises. Wrong kind of furnace, wrong kind of copper. Thin wire (0.6mm) has a high surface area to volume ratio which makes rapid oxidation in the 800C+ zone fairly fast., and the furnace environment is also oxidative rather than reductive as a smelter would be. By putting a ceramic wool blanket on top of the reactor I know I can get to 1150C which is 100C more than the melting point of copper, but 300C or so under the melting point of copper oxide. If I up the voltage to increase the heat still more, I run every chance of frying the heater coils.

Your proposal demands some careful though to make it feasible. It might be better to just melt some thicker copper bar in my forge and pour it onto the quartz/alumina. But I'm not sure that it will show us anything worthwhile= because there is little evidence that the copper wire in LION ever melted in the conventional sense.